LucasArts Q&A

Share.

By Andrew Burnes

Boomtown had a chinwag with LucasArts' President, Jim Ward, who believes there are no meaningful stories in today's selection of games:

Is there still room for a revolution?

Oh, absolutely. Right now there is no story in games. Gaming right now is about button management, basically. Take for instance Grand Theft Auto, a great game, I love it and play it, a fantastic game. But the story of that is just simply a broad context, you drive around some places and shoot people. But there is no real compelling story telling, very rarely you see this in good games.

In Half-Life, there was an attempt. But we need to infuse story into those games and make them compelling because every kind of entertainment, if it's a movie, a play, whatever it is, is all based on story and characters.

We need to figure out ways in which to make the story compelling in terms of humour and suspense. So that maybe whatever I'm wearing has an impact on that storyline and ripples through and changes on an infinite branching base what the story meant to be.

And then on the character side, tell me the last character you played that you fell in love with. That happens very rarely, right? It's not like going to a movie. So we have to change that and there are a couple of levels to that. One is on a more mechanical level, where the character has to, through AI, feel real. And the other is a more Turing level AI, so if you interact with a character, they ARE real. This is the Holy Grail and we've got to achieve that. The next generation platforms will help us along the way.

Dude, if you're falling in love with movie characters, you need help, stat.